The new terminal at Louis Armstrong International Airport will be completed on time, members of the New Orleans Aviation Board said Monday after scrapping proposals by two joint ventures who have been vying for the $546-million contract since April.

It's not clear, though, how that will be possible without significantly squeezing the project timeline, which calls for the project to be completed by March 2018, a deadline some were calling tight even before the proposal process left the tracks.

The joint venture of Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro had filed a protest after Parsons-Odebrecht was awarded the job last month.

First, the board will have to re-advertise the project and solicit new proposals. Then, those proposals will have to be put through an evaluation and scoring process in front of a special Review Committee. Finally, the Aviation Board will have to meet and decide whether to award the contract based on the Review Committee's findings.

That process took three months, the first go-round.

The board may also try to clear up some of the issues that arose in the initial process by tweaking its request for proposals, a 166-page tome of instructions and specifications for those hoping to snag the job. If it does that, the delay might even be longer.

Beyond some vague rhetoric about putting the interests of the airport and the community first, the board did not explicitly state its reasons for starting the proposal process over.

The board called both teams qualified and encouraged them to submit proposals again. However, it said that there were legitimate "concerns" about the way the original process unfolded, so, erring on the side of caution, the board thought it best to start with a clean slate.

The board did not name those concerns.

"There have been issues raised by the Hunt protest and by public comment, concerning the scoring on DBE and cost; enough so that we were compelled to begin again to be absolutely sure that we get this right in the best interest of community and the region," Aviation Board Chairwoman Cheryl Teamer said in a statement. "It is our goal that this city and region have a new, world-class airport built on time, on budget and with openness and public confidence in the overall process and final decision."

Joint venture Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro, whose protest led to the decision to scrap the process and start over, said that it planned to resubmit a proposal. Matt Barnes, of Hunt Construction, an Indiana-based contracting behemoth and the lead firm in the joint venture, declined to comment beyond his intention to resubmit.

Parsons-Odebrecht, which beat out Hunt-Gibbs after a tie-breaking round of interviews, said in a statement that it was disappointed with the Aviation Board's decision. "We will assess our options moving forward once we review the new RFP and the selection process."

The Review Committee initially scored both teams 999 points out of a possible 1,100. To break the tie, it held a second round of interviews, after which Parsons-Odebrecht came out on top, 1,002 points to 956.

That prompted the protest from Hunt-Gibbs, which claimed that the committee had made mistakes in the first round of scoring.

Two members of the committee scored both joint ventures equally on the matter of price. Hunt-Gibbs said that it would have invested $14 million more on actual construction costs, rather than overhead and profit.

Additionally, Hunt-Gibbs argued, the committee over penalized its team for a paperwork glitch related to its inclusion of disadvantaged business enterprises, firms owned by minorities or women.

Parsons-Odbebrecht scoffed at both claims: The first prong of the protest was merely an accounting fudge based on how the firms classified hard-construction costs, company officials said. The second was Hunt-Gibbs grasping at straws for its failure to follow instructions on DBE inclusion.

The board's decision to annul the proposals and start over has to be seen as a victory for Hunt-Gibbs.

Though the team didn't come out of Monday's meeting with the contract, that was always an extremely unlikely outcome. Convincing the board to overrule the Review Committee's recommendation faced a high evidentiary hurdle.

According to the board's own lawyers, the Review Committee had the authority to act subjectively. Unless there was clear evidence that the Review Committee abused its authority or acted arbitrarily, the board was bound to uphold its recommendation, the attorney said.

By rejecting both proposals, the board sidestepped those requirements and breathed new life into the Hunt-Gibbs team.

The board decision came after public allegations were made about the treatment of minority workers by Woodward Design + Build, a New Orleans-based contractor on the Parsons-Odebrecht team.